


Time

by Tattered_Dreams



Series: In Any Other World [3]
Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types, The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Canon Divergence, Depression, Fix-It, Gen, Infected Newt, Injury, Insanity, M/M, Madness, Major Spoilers, Newt Lives, Newt POV, Only one difference, Pre Relationship, The Death Cure Spoilers, but some definite vibes/undertones, he's losing his mind what do you expect, messy narration, pre: Newtmas, tdc spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 05:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16298819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tattered_Dreams/pseuds/Tattered_Dreams
Summary: Major TDC Spoilers.-In which everything is the same but Newt survives-Canon up until the moment Newt coughs in the stairwell“Okay. Let’s go,” he says.Teresa is standing up before Thomas can reach her, but her expression is hollowed with urgency.“You need to come with me,” she says.-An exploration of a decaying mind--Heads up for somewhat graphic description of infection, madness, depression, generally dark shit and injury.





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> I am sorry this has been such a long time in the works. I've been writing it for months and it just...has been really testing me at points.
> 
> More notes at the end so I don't spoil anything. The narration is intentionally a little scattered but hopefully still enjoyable. Please also be aware of the warnings in the tags/summary. Split into two parts because of length.
> 
> Thank you to anyone who is still interested in this series. It means such a lot if you're still about :). Enjoy.

T̵̢i҉҉m͏̛̛e͢͝

He’d known this was coming.

He knew it wouldn’t be long. The invisible symptoms have been hounding him for weeks now. It started small – irrational sparks of depression, anger, irritation, splintering through his bloodstream. There were sparks of other things, too; hilarity that was a little too sharp, compassion that was a little too detached, and things that made his blood burn hot for other reasons. But those were things that there was just no time for; not in this world, not with these stakes, not for him.

Those moments had become the mood swings. But Newt had dealt with small voices in the back of his head for a long time. Some days he feels like he’d woken up four years ago in a box and had never been the only thing inside his own head. There had been voices telling him it was hopeless, that there was no way out, that this was it for them, that they hadn’t seen the last to die…

He’d given in once.

He’d heard the voice telling him that it would be so, so easy to escape. Not the Maze, no. Just…escape. That was easy. And he’d listened.

He’d lived to see the fallout of that moment of weakness. He’d lived to see how Minho had been devastated by it. He’d lived to meet Thomas. He’d lived to truly escape the prison that had created a dark space in his mind, and with that he’d sworn he wouldn’t listen to those voices anymore.

So handling them – even when he’d seen the poison spread under his skin, even when he’d known it wasn’t just his mind whispering lies – it had been…almost easy. Almost easy for a while.

He only slipped up on that early morning, somewhere high up behind the stone walls of the rebel base outside of the Last City.

The memory of it is vivid; perhaps too clear.

Thomas doesn’t want to use Teresa, and he knows – he _knows_ – why. She betrayed them already; how can they trust her now? With this? With Minho? How can Newt trust her with Thomas? He knows this is it. He’s been with Thomas too long to think it’s anything more. The other boy may not be able to truly stop caring, it’s not in his nature, but whatever feelings he may have had for her once, they’ve been brutalised by the knife she stabbed in their backs. The betrayal burns hotter for Thomas than the lost memories of whatever they might have been.

Newt knows all of that.

But knowing it doesn’t stop the way bitterness and malice claw their way up through his brain and ricochet out through his bloodstream.

Poison. Sickness.

It spits words at him that bite and snag, corrosive.

_Thomas is doing it to protect her._

Newt knows its not true even as he says it, accuses it, as his body moves without his consent, shoves Thomas back into the wall. Rage washes through his veins, his vision turning red.

And then in an instant…that’s all gone.

He’s acutely aware of his own hands, clawed into the thick fabric of Thomas’s jacket, knuckles fitting into the hollows of the other boy’s shoulders. He’s acutely aware of the emanating warmth, of the shift under his fists as Thomas breathes.

He’s standing in a dim room with the weight of four concerned stares at his back and Thomas…Thomas watching him so quietly, so closely, so entirely unafraid.

He comes back.

It’s not true. It’s not.

They’re lies his mind has told him.

Not to be believed.

Thomas.

Thomas he believes.

  


He’s thinking as clearly as he ever has when he sits on the roof only minutes after leaving that war room. He’s not even contemplating the drop beneath his hanging legs. Nothing about the distance down calls to him anymore. He only wants to know how he’s meant to say goodbye to the people he will be leaving behind - knowing that this time, it will not be his choice.

He’s not sure which is worse.

It’s the first time he slips up, lets the voices in. It’s the first stab of reality for just what the Flare is doing; eroding away who he is.

.

  


  


The door crashes open into the stairwell.

Newt knows it’s premature to think this is going well by any means. He knows all too well that where Thomas is involved, things often end up being improvised, but even so. Right now they’ve at least made it through the main lobby of the complex.

He’s going to count that as a success even if the rest goes wrong from here.

Thomas is already moving for the stairs, his motions clean and quick. There’s somehow a precision and a focus in him right now that he seems to hold in reserve, mask beneath the frenetic way he usually shares himself with the world.

Newt isn’t sure how he does it or where he learned it.

He remembers the long, sun-bleached days that led them here; Vince showing him to balance a rifle in the hollow of his shoulder, to weather the recoil of a Sig Sauer in his hands, how to cover someone, how to keep the weapon ahead of him always… But he’s still not entirely sure how Thomas does this. He looks like he’s _trained_ and Newt still isn’t wholly sure how he feels to see it in action.

It’s…

Concerning? No. Perhaps it should be, but it’s not. Reassuring? No. It’s something. Definitely something.

Newt follows him, though. He’ll always do that.

But they get barely a few paces down the steps before Gally’s voice pulls them back.

“Hold on,” he says, voice muffled through his matte black mask. “Hold on. I can get in here.”

His voltage rifle – stolen in preparation for this, like the rest of their clothing – lowers in one hand as he presses the other one in its thick glove over the metal panel of the electrical station. The box is bolted firmly to the wall, the door clearly locked.

Still.

He sounds fairly sure about it.

Thomas nods at him. “Okay – throw me the walkie.”

Gally tosses it in an arc through the air, already focused on the electrical box. He’s pulling a small modified power drill from the pocket of his fatigues. Thomas catches the radio mid-air and then lifts his gun back up, wheeling around to track down the stairs, scouting ahead just in case.

This time Newt stays put.

The clawing at his throat is sudden with no warning. Newt gives up the plan to venture up the steps to check their cover in favour of pulling up his mask as the cough scrapes out. The stab of it is bearable, for now, but it comes with a thick, tacky feeling that sits deep in his lungs, and that’s almost worse.

He’s abruptly terrified.

It’s a remembered kind of terror, the sort that comes from pushing something away to avoid it, only to have it hit all over again later.

He’s not afraid of the cough itself, not of that, but of what it means.

Reality is coming for him.

Its one thing to go to sleep at night imagining poison pulsing under your own skin and remembering the moments that something angry and cruel took over your body. This is different. It’s another thing to feel his throat start to dry out, scrape raw, to feel the tremor burrow deeper than muscle into the core of who he is. To feel his bones ache with holding on.

Physical symptoms like this mean he’s running out of time.

He knows it won’t happen yet, but all he can picture is the emaciated, infected flesh of Lawrence’s face.

He doesn’t want to live long enough for that to be him.

He’s terrified.

Not to die, never to die.

Terrified to be something else.

He has no illusions. Lawrence wouldn’t be human any more without that drip. He’s not an idiot. The same thing is coming for him.

The cough dries out and Newt feels his mind race back to him – its already taking its own tangents. _Good that_ , he thinks glibly, and then- _Great_. Even the voice in his head is deeply sarcastic. But there’s now a more pressing issue.

Teresa is staring at him.

There’s a vivid, sharp expression on her face, realisation burning bright in the cool blue of her eyes.

Newt has to turn away from it.

_She knows, she knows, she knows, she knows._

_Is that good or bad?_

There’s red in his vision, warning in the electric beat of his stressed heart. It’s too fast, too fast. He’s pumping the infection around _too fast_.

He doesn’t trust her and her knowing this about him, it gives her something to use. Not against him – he doesn’t care about that.

He won’t let her do it. He can’t.

He won’t be used as a weapon against Thomas.

  


It’s only been a few seconds. That doesn’t seem right, but Newt’s not going to argue.

Gally is already at work; sparks snapping through the air as he uses the improvised drill-head to shear through the lock. Thomas is back on their tiny bit of landing, striding through the dead space between Teresa and Newt.

She doesn’t move. She’s watching with wide-eyed, dismayed horror; like someone seeing events unfold that will lead up to a car crash and not being sure what to say to stop it. Newt feels that analogy slide through his mind like sewer water; he doesn’t like the implication in it that they’re heading for a crash.

He straightens as best he can against the banister rail.

He won’t be something else for Thomas to worry about.

“Frypan, we’re in, how you doing?” Thomas asks into the walkie, checking the door they came through. He seems finally satisfied they’re as safe as they can be for the moment.

The radio crackles to life as Thomas lifts off the comm button and Fry’s voice, muffled with static, fills the stairwell.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, and if Newt didn’t know what he should be doing right then, he’d easily pass off the slight breathlessness as radio interference. “I’m getting there. Tell Minho hi for me.”

Newt’s heart wrenches.

Frypan is going to tell him himself. He has to.

“Hang in there, Buddy,” Thomas says to sign off.

By that time, Newt realises Gally is already through. He yanks the door open and his expression is solid and unfazed as he pulls at the coloured wires. Clearly it makes some kind of sense to him.

“This’ll work,” he says.

 _Good_ , Newt thinks sharply. Because if it doesn’t the next part could be tricky. It’s not like they were relying on Lawrence’s help for a reason or anything.

But Thomas just accepts that and leaves him to start splicing the wires. He’s back on the walkie in the next instant. For all the times they’ve given him hell for doing stupid stuff and not thinking anything through, he really knows how to keep an eye on a plan when he actually has one.

At least until it inevitably derails.

Newt is under no illusions about this either; if this entire thing goes off exactly as they discussed it he’ll eat dehydrated soup for a week. It’s not going to happen.

Nor is him living long enough to eat soup for a week.

“Brenda,” Thomas calls into the speaker, thumb pressed over the comm button again. “What’s your status?”

There’s another crackle of life from the radio. Behind Thomas, Newt watches Teresa’s gaze shift, slide across the floor and then dart back up to the other boys. Newt moves around the banister to better block the way down – only in case, just in case – as Brenda’s voice comes through.

“Status is I’m working on it.”

Thomas turns back and Newt is already looking at him, already expecting it. He tries to make his mind slow down, fights to ignore – _just for now, just a little longer, please_ – the spiky pulsing that feels like every thought he has is being dragged over shattered glass and hot coals.

He needs to be here just a little longer.

But the timing fits, he’s sure. Brenda should be at least inside the garage by now, if not already hotwiring a bus. He nods once. Thomas takes that as affirmation.

“Copy,” he says into the walkie, eyes still on Newt. It’s grounding him, keeping him present. _They’re almost there_. “Make sure you’re ready on your end.”

There’s a pause. Everything in the stairwell is still. And then- “Don’t worry. You know I’m gonna be there.”

She sounds certain, a touch of…something in her tone that isn’t tense or anxious or doubting. Newt feels some strange, distant kind of pressure lift off of him.

Whatever happens here, with them, between these stairs and Minho, Brenda will do her part.

Thomas wheels around just as Gally must have finished placing the interference device that Lawrence’s tech guys gave them. He slams the metal door closed. It’s a dull clang, a cold echo.

The noise turns over in Newt’s head. So loud. So far away.

_Almost there._

_He just needs to stay a little longer._

“Okay. Let’s go,” he says.

Teresa is standing up before Thomas can reach her, but her expression is hollowed with urgency.

In that moment Newt feels his mind ping back to him like snapped elastic. He watches two futures as they split, fall away from each other right in front of his eyes. There is the one where Teresa says nothing, the one where she lets Thomas take her elbow and move her onward, down the stairs to the sublevel.

And there’s this one.

  


“You need to come with me,” she says.

The itch is back suddenly, flashing hot and cold, igniting sparks of aggravation in the centre of Newt’s brain all over again. That same urgency colours her voice, the words rushing out into the static air hanging in the stairwell.

“Oh? And why is that?” Gally demands.

He’s not impressed. He’s rarely impressed. He sounds like he’d happily shoot Teresa. Newt has always liked Gally.

“Because-“ she flicks her eyes around, down the stairs and then back up. She’s searching for the right thing to say and then she’s talking to Thomas. Always Thomas. “-this way goes to the wrong part of the sublevels, and there’s a retina scan door that I haven’t got access for. I know a better way.”

Gally scoffs.

Newt expected more.

He’s not sure what. More…something. A better excuse, a better reaction. One of the two.

“Yeah, nice try, but I don’t think so,” Gally says and Newt lets a twinge of agreement tug through his chest. That’s better. Better. “I know this building,” Gally continues. “I know where we’re going; I know what security measures there are in place. You think we did this lightly?”

And honestly, Newt can’t fault Teresa for thinking they might have done.

Thomas isn’t exactly known for thinking things through or having more than the vaguest outline of a working plan. It would be more concerning if they didn’t also have the uncanny habit of usually working out.

Thomas steps up to her then and his eyes are cold. “You’re here for appearances only,” he says. “We want to do this without hurting anyone we don’t have to, but Teresa?” his voice lilts on her name, makes sure she’s hearing him. “If I have to shoot my way to Minho, I will.”

Teresa’s expression folds, collapses, twists. It’s warped with…panic? Horror? Newt can’t quite be sure, but he knows its…odd. Not what he’d have thought.

He didn’t think he’d ever see her conflicted this way. He isn’t sure what to make of it.

Thomas gives her a hard, expectant look. “So you want to try again?”

Generous.

Could they not just push her down the stairs?

No. That’s not fair. Is it? It might be.

His head hurts; feels like there’s a clamp around it and shocks of vicious anger reverberate through his synapses as it squeezes slowly tighter on his skull. He doesn’t own that. It’s not his, this anger – he knows that. The world is a confusing place but _betrayal_ scrolls across his brain like a war chant – she did betray them. He doesn’t trust her – why does Thomas?

Wait. They’re using her. He remembers.

“There’s something upstairs,” Teresa says after a second, swallowing hard. “You’re going to need it.”

He doesn’t believe her. Doesn’t believe her. Doesn’t.

“Yeah, like what?” Gally asks. It sounds like he’s challenging her to say absolutely anything and already knows nothing will be good enough. It sets the bar high.

“Something of Minho’s,” Teresa says after a suspended second. She throws his name out like it’s a gauntlet. Perhaps it is. “Something you’ll need.”

Newt bites down on his tongue, feels the red hot pulse through the centre of his brain. The bite itself feels a little odd – distant though it still hurts. The sensation grounds him as much as it scares him.

Pain makes you human. Who are you without it? If he’s losing his own responses to it…how long does he have before that’s gone?

How long does he have left to be him?

He focuses, holding tight to the fear to keep him in that shadowed stairwell, not lost in the corners of his own corroding mind.

Gally looks incredulous, eyebrows a sharp angle on his face and mouth a tight, hard line.

“You’re not serious?” He demands, and it really doesn’t sound like a question at all as he shoots that impressive glare across to Thomas. “Thomas, she’s lying, she’s stalling, she-“

“ _She_ is actually trying to help,” Teresa interjects.

Gally shoots her a dark, foreboding look and she’s wise enough to back away from him a little, but her eyes hold firm.

“Look,” she tries, voice forcibly calmer. “The lab I need is just one floor up from here. It’s close; right off the stairs. Come with me. We’ll get it and then…then-“

“Then nothing,” Thomas snaps. “You-“

“Come with me,” Teresa pleads over him. “To the lab – right now – we’re wasting time, Thomas. And then…then I’ll get you through the staff corridor.”

Newt’s brain stalls.

Since his brain either moves at lightning speed or in fits and bursts of slowly increasing nonsense – yes, he’s well aware. Or, he is after it happens, anyway – Newt is more familiar with the feeling of his brain being offline than he’d like. But he’s with it enough to register the way Gally’s eyes snatch up to Teresa and the way Thomas blinks at this new information.

“What?” Gally asks, his voice like a whip-crack, like he’s sure he misheard her.

The staff corridor is one they ruled out early on in the planning. It’s a secure door, not one that they can just press Teresa’s thumb to for her. It needs a code.

Teresa looks like she might be regretting it. Still, she swallows and nods. “I have that code. I’ll get you through that way. It’s quicker to the sublevel.”

Newt watches Thomas waver. It is a far quicker route. Its time they could use. The indecision isn’t subtle, and Teresa jumps on the opportunity it affords. Newt wants to smack her.

“Please, Thomas,” she presses, voice catching. “You’ll need it.”

Newt watches him cave; can pinpoint the moment he gives in by the shift of his shoulders and the hard exhale that follows.

“Fine,” Thomas says. He gestures up the steps next to them with his rifle, eyes never leaving Teresa. “One floor up – and its right there?”

“Yes.”

Teresa looks…genuinely relieved. It’s odd. Suspicious.

“Hold it,” Newt says.

The words break out of him before he’s consciously decided to use them, but he doesn’t try to retract them once they’re said, hanging frozen in the air.

Eyes fly to him on either side, furrowed curiosity and mild alarm and probably impatience too. He doesn’t look away from Teresa who meets his gaze with something like trepidation.

“Newt-“ Thomas tries.

_Shut up, Tommy._

The thought isn’t unkind or errant. Its casual, if purposeful, even in his own head, enough only to get the point across in their usual unspoken way. Newt barely flicks his eyes across to him and Thomas closes his mouth. That’s reassuring; that despite everything he’s still going to listen, still trusts Newt’s judgement, even though he knows he’s sick – even though Newt screamed at him, set his hands on him. It helps the thick, dark pressure in his head ease a little.

“She gives us the code first,” Newt says.

He’s not budging. She betrayed them once. That was enough. He won’t, can’t, won’t let her do it again. Not now, not so close to getting Minho out.

He had been prepared to die on that mountain a year ago, standing behind Thomas with Minho at his shoulder. This is not the same. He can’t face the thought of them all being found, captured, perhaps killed, and Minho simply…never knowing they came for him.

Code first.

Teresa’s eyes are wide but Gally looks pleased, even impressed, the severe angles of his face twisted into expressions he doesn’t normally wear.

It should have occurred to him but Newt can forgive that. His eyebrows take up too much room. Only fitting a few brain cells had to go.

 _Wow_. Newt shakes his head and blinks. _Just a little longer._

Teresa shows she, at least, has a few neurons to spare. She doesn’t protest…but she also doesn’t speak. Maybe not so many, then.

“You give us the code now or we don’t go,” Newt says. And then, because Teresa has already guessed anyway, “Don’t make me shoot you.”

Thomas’s eyes are on him, wariness flickering beneath a steadfastness that says he’ll back Newt up on it, just like always, even if he’s concerned for him. He says nothing, though. Gally just shrugs. As far as he’s probably concerned, this is likely a perfectly reasonable threat – he had been the one to suggest removing the girl’s thumb only hours before, after all.

Gally has no room, Newt decides, to deem anyone else’s threats overkill.

The important reaction is Teresa’s.

She knows Newt is sick. She knows better, in this moment, than to assume he is lying about this.

His impulse control comes and goes.

He’s fighting to hold onto it, mostly. He still mostly feels like him, but he’s aware his brain is running away from him easier, that there are whole moments he _lets_ the flare swell hot in his head and speak for him. Still, he’s fighting it because he needs to be here. Some form of impulse control or even just a little bit of a backup plan is necessary, and he can’t rely on Thomas or Gally for that.

But for this?

Teresa knows he’ll do it; let the flare take over just long enough for him to point a gun at her. Of course he’d regret it, but he’s going to die soon. He won’t have to live with it long.

Teresa’s eyes are wide but not even a little sceptical. She spent years observing them through a monitor, Newt remembers savagely; she should know enough by now to realise what they’re all capable of when pushed. And clearly she does.

“The code is an eight digit pin,” is the very next thing she says. “Seven, one, five, two, six, four, eight, three. Now can we go?”

Thomas glances at Newt, nods, and they go, but everything inside Newt is burning, twisting, hollowing.

_Of course it is._

WCKD love their irony.

Of course this code is the same one they escaped the Maze with.

.

Teresa’s thumb print lets them into a lab right off of the stairwell, as she promised.

“I got your back,” Gally says. He turns away, hefting his gun across his body pointedly. The door closes on him with a sleek _snickt_ kind of sound and he’s left in the hallway alone.

Newt isn’t too certain splitting up is best, but then…perhaps having him on the outside is a good idea. If Teresa is setting them up, planning to turn on them for a second time, at least one of them still might have a chance of reaching Minho. He’s what matters.

And anyway – if someone is staying behind, Gally is their only option.

Teresa won’t talk if Thomas isn’t there. She wants to try to get into his head. Newt knows it. She’s had enough chances and its done nothing so far but it doesn’t mean she won’t keep trying. not when she believes she’s doing the right thing. Newt can’t let it happen. But even if he trusts Thomas to not be swayed Newt won’t let him go alone.

He’s running out of time and he wants to spend it seeing Minho one last time and staying at Thomas’ side.

The lab is shining, clinical and absent of any kind of atmosphere at all. The air has a processed taste, the counters are empty and washed down, the equipment perfectly placed and aligned on tables. The ceiling and plinths around the cupboards are clustered with thousands of emotionless lights.

“What are we doing here?” Thomas asks. There’s a bite to his voice. “You said we needed something?”

Teresa doesn’t answer.

That on its own makes irritation crackle, white hot in every single one of Newt’s nerve endings. He feels frayed, unwound.

She strides past them towards a gleaming glass cabinet with LED lights glowing in delicate rows on the sterile shelves inside. Each tiny bulb highlights a tiny vial of bright blue liquid.

Its something Newt has never seen before with his own eyes, but he knows what it is anyway.

Thomas has told him about it, and even if he hadn’t, there’s little else it could be. It’s an easy connection for a mind to make; even one that’s breaking apart the way his is.

His heart lurches in his chest.

Terror bursts outwards through his bloodstream like the explosion of a warhead and before he even knows what he’s doing, he’s moved.

Newt lets go of the rifle with one hand, using it to grab Thomas’ arm and yank him backwards.

“New-“

“What _are_ we doing here?” Newt barks across the room. He can hear his own voice shake and maybe it’s that which makes Thomas go still.

“This is the stuff, isn’t it?” he presses. “We didn’t come here for her to use you like a human pincushion, Thomas. So if she doesn’t explain right now, we’re goi-“

“I’m not going to do anything to him,” Teresa interrupts.

Newt scoffs. “You’ll excuse me for not believing y-“

Her voice cuts straight across his again. “I’m actually trying to save _you_ , Newt.”

  


Everything stops.

  


It comes back slowly.

First the gleaming lights of the lab, then the frozen way Teresa is standing, half out of sight, and then the ambient noise of the equipment. The tick, blip and whir of the advanced software, the fans, the processing drives and even the dull buzz of the power lighting along the benches feel like the heady beat of a kind of smoky music Newt’s only heard once before.

All of that comes back before Newt realises three things.

One – That he can only half see Teresa because Thomas has moved in front of him.

Two – That Teresa is standing frozen because Thomas suddenly looks incredibly lethal. His shoulders are a fixed line of tension, visible even through the thick material of his fatigues. Or maybe only visible to him – Newt can’t be sure. (He doesn’t know if Teresa ever really did see Thomas in the first place).

And three – That the two of them are locked into an argument that has clearly been going for a while.

He’s been detached all that time.

Realising that feels like coming back into his own body not quietly, not languidly the way it feels like waking up from sleep, but like slamming into a concrete pavement from the height of a Maze wall.

He would know, after all.

The pounding of the noises in the room fades completely – sensory input that his mind, present again, deems unnecessary – and now he can hear their voices instead.

The pain comes back too.

He didn’t miss that. The clawing, festering feeling that’s knotted in his gut, carving out his lungs, viscous in his throat, sluggish in his veins.

_Just a little longer. A little longer._

The first thing he hears is Thomas.

“-y are you doing this, Teresa?”

“Because I am trying to save people,” she says, something earnest and fierce in her tone. “I did all of this to try to save people, and I want you to believe me.”

One heartbeat. Two.

“I can’t,” Thomas says, and he sounds sorry, broken, but steadfast, unmoved.

Teresa’s face falls, desperation sinking into the sharp, cold blue of her eyes. “Newt is sick – you are, aren’t you?” she tries instead, attention darting to him briefly. Newt has no intention of answering that, but she turns back to Thomas anyway. “And look, Thomas, I think you’re the answer to all of this-“

“Don’t listen to her,” Newt jumps in there. That familiar, fever hot itch of rage is prickling beneath his skin. His vision is touched with red. “We have to go.”

“If you don’t listen to me Newt could die.”

Frankly Newt wishes she would just die. The anger pulses behind his eyes, flares out through his bloodstream, boiling in his veins. He hates her, hates her, hates. But he knows – he thinks – that’s not really him. It’s not. But right now he lets it course through his brain.

She’s wielded the one thing Newt knows will make Thomas hesitate. She’s used him; his life.

And he hates her for it.

He can see the way Thomas’ resolve realigns. “Talk fast,” he says cuttingly.

A spark and a match and tiny shocks of fury; strange disconnected ghostly images and sensations skittering across his mind. His own emotions don’t make sense. He knows it’s useless but he can’t stop himself trying- “Thom-“

Teresa leaps to talk over him, the words spilling out fast. Thomas has given her a second and she’s seizing it.

Hates her for it.

“Brenda’s serum lasted all this time, but no one else’s has. And I think that means something but I don’t know what. If you’d just let me test y-“

“Are you insane?”

Thomas says it before Newt can. Probably a good thing.

Newt feels his hands shake around the semi automatic balanced between them. His clothes itch, press, constricting on his skin. Too tight. Too hot. The red pulse in his head thrums to its own beat. He feels like he’s vibrating out of his own body.

Is this what poison feels like?

Is this what insanity tastes like?

Why would insanity taste of anything? He thinks, idly, that maybe it tastes like the sewer smelled. It seems fitting.

Thomas’ voice tugs him back. Newt zones back in to find him tense with aggravation, incredulity cold in his expression.

“Look,” Teresa says, ignoring that. “I know you don’t want to trust me, okay. But…” she catches her breath, eyes darting between both of Thomas’ – _why? Why him_ – and then over to Newt before she turns right back to that cabinet.

Moments later she’s holding out a tiny glass capsule.

The redness drains from Newt’s vision, the lab washing through with untainted colours; cold white light, blinking greens and violets on the equipment surrounding them on shining tabletops. The liquid visible in the vial between Teresa’s fingers is bright, vivid blue.

“Take this,” she says. “This is Minho’s serum. It’s the strongest we have, but even this wears off. Just…give it to Newt-“ she looks at him now, eyes wild like she knows everything inside of him has violently recoiled away, something snakelike and full of skin-tight revulsion twisting in his chest. “Take it,” she insists. “And then you’ll see.”

Newt can’t see Teresa any more.

It takes his brain – _Minho’s, Minho’s, that came from Minho, she took it from Minho_ – precious seconds to catch up with why.

Thomas is standing between them.

Protecting, always prot- wait. No. That’s not right. He’s…upset. Angry, maybe. Thomas isn’t facing Newt. He’s facing Teresa.

A bolt goes through Newt’s brain like a needle, the twinge sharp enough to make him wince. Thomas placed himself between them for _him_ , not for her.

“See what?” Thomas demands.

“That it isn’t a cure,” Teresa says. She sounds broken. “We don’t have one; we’re still trying to find it, but, Thomas, it will give Newt time. Time to find that cure, because he doesn’t have enough left without it.”

  


“No,” Newt says, unequivocally.

Teresa’s expression flashes and he wants to call it annoyance even though it’s too sad to be that.

“You’re already getting worse,” she tells him. “I’ve done nothing but study this for months. I know what I can see. How long have you had the mood swings? When did you start feeling your vision affected? How often have you said or done something you regr-“

“Hey,” Thomas’ voice cracks into the cold space between them, his body surging forward. Teresa falters on the spot, falling instantly silent and her fingers shake on the vial she’s still holding.

Newt swallows hard. He can taste copper and disease at the back of his throat.

_Only once._

The rest he’s felt for a while now, slowly festering, growing, until he had to stop denying what it was. But that one – How often have you said or done something you regret – that one…

He remembers spitting fury in his veins, the haze of anger across his brain and closing Thomas in against a wall as their friends watched in slow-moving horror. He remembers his fingers fisted into Thomas’ jacket and suddenly being himself again.

_Only once._

And Thomas knows it. He knows he can’t forgive himself for that and he won’t allow Teresa to follow through with using it against him.

They’re always protecting each other and Newt doesn’t know what he did to earn this, to deserve someone who will fight for him this way, but he doesn’t want to lose it.

He doesn’t want to die, to lose his mind, to not be who he is.

But this price…

_Minho is the one who paid it._

“No,” he says again, this time his voice wavering over the word. There’s an electrified push-pull in his blood, like shards of glass trying to move through sludge. All he sees are two choices.

In one of them he takes the serum and he knows that he’s alive, sane – for a while anyway – because Minho suffered for it. In the other he doesn’t take it…and maybe he’s not even himself to see Minho again, to ever leave this place. Maybe in that world…he dies before they can get out.

Teresa sighs. It’s a full body, deflating, exasperated kind of sigh that Newt hadn’t expected.

“So you’re just going to let it happen?” she asks – well. It’s more of a demand really. “Have you even thought for a second about what it’ll do to the others to watch you turn? Do you even know what will happen? Because I’ve seen it. How can you want Minho to see that? How can you put Thom-“

“Don’t,” Thomas cuts again, his voice even colder. If it was cold before, its frozen now; icy and sheer and knife-like.

Teresa’s eyes snatch across to him, wide and somewhere between furious and horrified.

Newt feels strangely far away.

“Don’t tell me you’re just okay with this,” she says.

He’s not. Not, not, not.

Can’t she see that?

A muscle ticks in Thomas’ jaw as he rolls his tongue behind his teeth. Newt watches the motion of it, transfixed and so distant, like he’s not even inside his own body, like he’s barely in the room.

“It’s not my choice,” Thomas replies, voice tight, impassioned. “If it was me you got this from I’d be telling him to do it, but it’s not. And Minho isn’t here, is he? So I don’t know what you did to get this from him. What _I_ want isn’t the point; this decision isn’t mine.” He tilts his head, eyes narrowing with something like revulsed curiosity. “But you really think I’d let you use us to make him choose?”

Teresa’s expression closes off. She folds her arms across her slim frame, blue eyes remote and so reminiscent of the serum she’s stealing from people like herself; people whose blood runs blue, people she betrayed. Of course she thought she could use Thomas and Minho against him.

A beat passes.

“This is where we are now,” she says. Her voice is soft but so empty. She’s looking at Newt again. “If you don’t take this, and very soon - you’re going to turn. It’s your choice; I just hope you make the right one. None of you came all this way just to get Minho back and lose you instead.”

Anger prickles at the back of Newt’s thoughts. (That’s getting repetitive. He’s had enough of it but he also agrees with it). She has no right to talk like she knows what they’ve been through, how far they’ve come, or what the right choice is. She has no right to suggest anything at all – suggest that they’ll –

But that thought is detached, half formed; aborted in his mind even as his subconscious offers it up like many of the thoughts its given him over the years.

_They’re going to lose him._

He’s already losing himself – what hope do they have of holding onto him when he can’t even do it?

She’s right and he hates it.

He’s seeing in a haze. He can taste copper and the sewer at the back of his throat. His own skin feels foreign, weak like it will tear, and pulled tight over his bones. The beat inside his head has stretched into a burning headache and drawing in each breath leaves him with a stinging sensation, deep in his chest.

Teresa slams the vial down on the table nearest her. Three glass tumblers shudder and clink on the surface and a dull metallic ring echoes up to the ceiling.

“Take it. I said I’d get you to the sublevel. Just take it, Newt.”

Why is she so insistent? Why does she care? Isn’t he a part of the population that WCKD had forsaken? She doesn’t care about his life – no that’s not it.

She cares about the experiment she would be running if he took it. Maybe that’s part of it, but it’s not everything. They’re leaving; it’s not like she could use him for data.

No it’s far more simple and human than any of that.

She’s trying to save him because she knows Thomas won’t listen to her if she doesn’t.

Wrath claws at the cage of his ribs, like a creature trying to tear out of him. He remembers the stairwell, the corrosive surge up his spine. She’s using him against Thomas.

Does that mean that refusing sets him free? Or does taking the serum do that?

He doesn’t know, doesn’t know, doesn’t.

But he doesn’t want to die here.

  


It’s a mess in his head; chaos and mayhem and fraying threads.

The lights are too bright, the ambient sounds of machinery climbing in pitch until the blips and whirs are screaming in his ears and it feels like his skull is cracking. He can feel his heart hammering beneath layers of constricting, itchy clothing, the cold sweat at the base of his throat and the throb at the centre of his brain.

The tiny vial of serum sits between them.

Thomas is rigid beside him. Only the tips of Teresa’s fingers tremble the other side of the table.

Newt swallows, turns his mind in and tugs at the burning embers firing through his synapses in a way that feels like breaking a glow stick even though he has no idea how his mind might have stored that analogy.

It comes slowly, and then all at once.

The red in his vision catches light and takes over. Impulse and insanity scurry through his head, twist and warp reality, sickly eating into him. He lets it happen. Just one more time, just for this. Because if the Flare does this, it’s not his decision. If the Flare does this, then it’s not him using his best friend’s suffering to buy himself more time.

And maybe then he can live with it.

.

Teresa is quick to load the dose into an auto injector as soon as Newt tells her to do it. She doesn’t wait to ask if he’s sure, doesn’t wait for him to change his mind.

Thomas stares at him, eyes deeply troubled but so, so relieved and Newt gets it more than he’d like to admit. He’s still himself enough for that.

Soon, he will have to acknowledge this with a clear mind; the choice he made, and Thomas – who once worked for the company who imprisoned them all – gets what that means better than most. After all, Thomas is still afraid of the person he was back then; before his memories were taken. Afraid of the things he did, afraid of why he cooperated to start with, afraid of what he suffered or saw to make him change his mind.

Newt suspects he knows, but its something he never really got the chance to ask. Of the few people who could have even known the answer, only one ever would have told him, and she was murdered on a mountain a year ago.

“Newt…” Thomas murmurs. He edges close to him, shooting a wary eye at Teresa as she watches the injector power up.

But his voice dries up as Newt looks over at him. Maybe he never knew what he was going to say to begin with.

On impulse Newt reaches out and curls his fingers just around Thomas’. Its okay, it’s okay. He can blame the Flare. (The fact that soon he won’t have it to blame it still feels abstract). Their gloves are too thick for any real sensation to pass through, but Newt can just about feel Thomas automatically squeeze back once.

A breath of a second passes between them; oddly suspended with the way their gloved fingers link around each other’s. For that single moment, it feels like he’ll never die, like he’ll get to keep something truly good. This is the way he gets that chance.

Thomas exhales lowly and nods, eyes casting down.

In the end, neither of them needs to say anything.

They both let go as Teresa turns around, holding the injector up.

Thomas is a dreamcatcher, Newt thinks absently, wildly, insanely. He keeps bad things away, somehow, and its as he steps aside to allow this that it all rushes in. Now, instead of whatever moment of clarity that was, Newt feels a dark, nauseating coil of anxiety twist tight in the pit of his stomach and then lurch upwards, trying to ricochet out of him.

What if this makes him worse? What if she lied? What if it’s still not enough? What if it goes wrong anyway? What if it’s faulty? What if it just doesn’t work?

What-

What if it _does_?

  


Newt pulls his glove off with his teeth and tosses it onto the clear counter just behind him in order to roll up his sleeve.

He glimpses the map of black, clotting veins under his skin and it makes him feel sick and spinning and wildly off kilter, his stomach turning over. He quickly looks away from it, swallows back bile and winces at the hard, viscid feeling in his throat.

He holds his arm out, eyes tight shut – Thomas is there, he’s safe – hears Teresa’s breath catch like it’s from a world away. “Are y-“

“Just do it,” he says woodenly.

He can feel her hesitate. He can feel the way Thomas sways beside him, almost like he wants to knock the injector away, or maybe like he wants to take it himself. Thomas has never been very good with inaction; whether it’s breaking them out or breaking them in, he needs to be doing something. Having to leave this in Teresa’s hands probably hurts in its own way. Newt considers for a second if it were Thomas who had to take an unknown serum, and he had to let this person do it. He feels violently sick again, eyes flying open.

But Thomas is holding up well, then, probably, despite the wild edge to his eyes and the muscle jumping in his jaw.

Teresa reaches out for him, loaded injector upturned in her hand; the electronic panel on the side glowing blue.

Newt can feel the thick, slow pump of blood in his own arm, right across the parallel tendons inside his wrist. Sludge in his veins, erosion in his brain.

And then the tiny needle bites down into his skin and there’s a sleek rushing sound as the serum discharges.

  


It’s like water spilling through his bloodstream, bright like sunlight but blissfully cool as it tears up the infection in its path. The spill becomes a rush becomes a flood and then it’s like he’s caught in a riptide ravaging his own body. Waves crash up over his chest, wash through his heart as it pulses madly, trying to keep up; a current tugs at the fibres of his muscles and ligaments, carves around his bones; his vision swims, colours blurring into a kaleidoscope and then- then.

Then it feels like being dunked underwater in a huge, sterile, cold swimming pool. Its something else he knows without truly knowing; this sensation, only the impression of it in his lost memory is etched in terror. What he does know is this time; he’s not afraid of drowning. It’s almost…reassuring, peaceful.

He thinks he’d like the ocean, if he ever gets to see one.

  


Thomas catches him as his legs give out and he buckles to the floor.

“Newt?!”

That voice feels so far away, too, even though he knows it’s not. The words slide down his neck and under the collar of his shirt; warm, tense, and more real than the eerily fresh air shivering in his lungs.

Newt tries to grab hold – wants it to be reassuring – but his fingers slip on the waxy fabric of Thomas’s stolen guard fatigues and he feels the grip Thomas has on him tighten. He can hear the terror-spun fury in his voice like he’s listening to it from two rooms away, from underwater, through someone else.

“What is this?”

How is he supposed to know?

Wait. No. Thomas isn’t asking him.

“What’s happening to him?”

“It’s normal.”

Who is that?

Oh.

Wait.

Teresa.

She was here. She gave him this. But that’s okay.

It feels like lucid dreaming, though he has no memory of ever doing that and couldn’t say how he even knows the concept. But that’s what it feels like. What he imagines it feels like, anyway.

He’s distantly aware of the room and everything in it; the blip and hum of the technology – quiet now, no longer screaming at him - the glowing cast of violet and white light behind his eyelids. Even as his muscles unwind on their own and he falls totally limp, he can taste something cold and clinical at the back of his throat. He’s aware of Teresa – standing a few feet away, the traces of her perfume just catching in the air and her anxious tension like an agitated creature in the empty space.

And he’s aware of Thomas.

Thomas, who hasn’t actually let him go.

There are fingers gripping the folds of the red jacket he’s wearing like it’s that simple; like you can hold a human being together with your bare hands. Thomas’ hands aren’t bare. That’s not the point.

Thomas is holding him together. He always does. That’s the point.

Awareness fades.

The inside of his mind feels like someone is using the flat blade of a paint stripping knife to scrape away old wallpaper. He can feel the awful, shrieking rasp of it like its being used on rough plaster; raking and chipping away at disease and decay. It burns and stings, and then starts to fade. The pain feels like a tide; rises, crests, surges, and then dims, dulls, dies.

  


Breathing feels effortless in a way he doesn’t even remember it being when his mind drifts back to the world again.

The hands on him, the wash of emotionless light behind his eyelids and the cold floor at his back are all more real than his own body. He feels like he’s floating away, lighter than air. He’s only tethered to the ground because Thomas is holding him there.

For the first time in a long time, his head is so quiet.

There’s only him inside it.

Only him.

He can hear talking – he can even pick out exact words, but he doesn’t try to focus too much. It’s freeing, being so at peace in his own mind again. Then, slowly, he feels gravity sink back into him and he pulls away from the spread of some distant galaxy to turn back to flesh and bone.

He sucks in a gasp, eyes blinking open and Thomas shifts over him.

“Newt? Newt, hey can you hear me?”

Newt groans, his throat feeling like he hasn’t used it in weeks, not just minutes, but there’s no burn. Swallowing doesn’t hurt, doesn’t come with that thick, tar-like consistency.

“How long’s it been?” he asks.

“A couple of minutes,” Teresa’s voice says from a short distance away.

A short distance.

It shouldn’t even be worth noting but Newt can’t help being glad that he can judge distance and space and even – hopefully – passing time again. He’s no longer sharing his body with a malignant entity intent on distorting his reality.

He moves to lever himself off the floor and feels oddly like laughing when his stomach doesn’t turn over in retaliation. Thomas gives him space as he sits up, and then grasps the hand Newt holds out without a second thought to help pull him back up to his feet.

When he sways, it’s nothing to do with the Flare and everything to do with the old, familiar twinge of an ache up his leg. The serum didn’t take that, and he’s glad for it. That’s his.

And with it, he knows he’s really alive.

Newt looks up at Thomas – completely ignoring Teresa. There’s nothing she can try to say right now that he wants to hear. She seems to realise it, staying warily silent in his peripheral. Thomas’ eyes focus on him, narrowed and questioning.

“Let’s go get him,” Newt says quietly.

.

“All Good?” Gally asks the second the lab door slides open.

His voice is muffled through the mask, but Newt doesn’t need to see his face. What he can hear tells him everything. Gally might sound annoyed but it’s an age old defence he’s always used to mask worry.

“Good,” Newt says.

Gally does a double-take. That much anyone could tell. Newt would have been able to tell if he were staring at a wall. He must look healthier already, and his voice isn’t brutalised anymore.

“What-” he starts but Newt pulls down his own mask. They have to move. This can wait.

Gally’s head tilts, a glance clearly darted at Thomas, and Newt might be insulted if he hadn’t already proved he’s capable of lying for the sake of a mission.

But Thomas nods, readjusting the voltage pulse rifle in his hands.

“He’s good,” he confirms on a breath. It sounds marginally like relief. Then he jerks his head toward the stairwell, clearly a gesture aimed at Teresa. “Your turn,” he says. “Let’s go.” His visor snaps down.

Knowing that both Newt and Gally have his back, Thomas turns to move first and that’s the same instant that Teresa’s hand flashes out towards him. It’s an impulse move which shows in the slight way her eyes widen even as her fingers press down on Thomas’ arm. Maybe she hadn’t even planned it quite this way. But it works.

Newt feels his hackles rise, irritation that is entirely his snapping in his veins in the same second that Thomas stalls on the steps.

First off – Get off of him.

Secondly – If this is another last ditch attempt to stop them, she has anoth-

“Let go,” Thomas tells her, cold and deadly serious through his mask.

Teresa flinches to let go of him immediately, even as she opens her mouth to speak. But she hesitates, eyes flashing across the visor that blocks her from reading him.

Newt pointedly hefts his rifle up higher across his chest. Gally’s gloved fingers drum in a skipping loop over the barrel of his own weapon.

“Thomas, please – think about th-“

“I have,” he cuts her off. There’s no coldness in that. He sounds almost sorry for her, quietly resolute. “Take us to him.”

Teresa’s expression crumples. She shoots a final wary, hopeless look between them all, knowing that all her arguments and stalling are done with. She deflates, breath sliding out slow, and finally starts down the stairs ahead of them.


	2. 2

Teresa leads them through the staff corridor to Sublevel Three as she promised. It’s quiet and they’re not seen at all, cameras pivoted to sealed entrances down the walls and no one else around. When they exit at the far end, they’re just one hallway from the heavy security door that blocks them from Minho.

It’s spared them navigating the building, actually realigning their plan which hadn’t factored in a detour for Newt’s life.

They fight their way in. It’s a clean operation; the guards stationed there not expecting an attack and in no way prepared for one. The control panels are easy to operate and they unlock the doors, ushering all the kids out. It’s strange to think of them as kids when most of them are Newt’s own age, but it’s also hard to think of himself as a kid any more, not after everything he’s survived – especially the things he didn’t intend to at the time.

Newt thinks maybe he stopped being a kid a long time ago, longer than he cares to remember or admit.

  


The victory turns hollow as the kids fill the control room.

Minho isn’t with them.

“Where is he?” Thomas demands, rounding on Teresa.

She finds him, doesn’t even stall or argue. There’s something telling in the furrow of her brow as she pins him down in the computer system; she hadn’t expected him to not be here. Its worrying.

He was sent to the medical wing. And there’s only one thing to do then. This is why they came here; they’re not leaving without him.

Gally has to break into the serum vault, has to get the kids out. Thomas has to find Minho and Newt won’t leave Thomas to go alone. Teresa has to lead him, but she doesn’t count. Newt doesn’t trust her with Thomas’ life; maybe he never has.

So they both go. Thomas can’t make him stay behind, not now that he has time - more of it, at least.

They end up in a lift with Janson, of all the people they could have encountered.

They get away, are out of sight with hope sparking through Newt’s nerves before he catches up to them on a catwalk, gun already in hand and crazed fury etched into his face. Thomas is threatening Teresa’s life, Janson is closing in and then safety glass is closing across Newt and Thomas, blocking them from the barrage of bullets that bounce like pennies off of the other side. Teresa pushed them to this relative safety. Neither he or Thomas stop to consider why.

For precious moments they are able to move through the medical wing in haste without anyone on alert for them. But then Ava is standing at the end of the hall, Thomas is raising a gun and Janson has caught up. Another gun raises in the space between them and Newt is shouting a warning, reaching, desperate, hauling Thomas out of the path of danger with his heart in his throat and fear tumbling through his bloodstream like shards of ice.

More bullets are flying, follow them down the hall as sirens start to sound and they give up on staying under the radar.

Newt’s world shifts into high gear; the fast and unforgiving scene of a fire fight blossoming inside the sterile walls. Shots ricochet off of every surface, flash fire bursts from the ported barrels of the semi automatics that the guard detail show up wielding and the rest are armed with electricity detonators. He loses track quickly of how many times he and Thomas pull each other from the path of a bullet, how many times they skid away from danger only to dash into it in the next turn.

But they’re alive; they’re doing okay. Until the moment they turn again, this time weapon-less, to stare down the barrel of one more gun.

And that’s where Minho finds them.

The man is thrown through a window.

His body shatters it as Minho roars. He’s clearly exhausted, traumatised, unsure of what’s even real and running almost entirely on a burst of adrenaline that won’t last him forever. But he’s alive; he’s standing in front of them.

And of course he not only saved himself but them as well.

For all the time they clawed back, they’re out of it again in just moments.

They’re barricaded in a room, storeys high and there is only one way out. Thomas and Minho launch a huge compressed nitrogen canister through the window, and Newt moves to stand with them in the space it’s made. Shattered glass gleams on the stone ledge as they watch the drum fall, splash and sink into a pool far below.

Newt is distantly aware of words passing beside him, of Minho’s eyes darting between them in disbelieving shock, of the way Thomas turns to look at him, just for a fleeting second, reluctance and apology written into his face. Newt tunes it all out.

Right now he has to.

They won’t leave him behind, and he won’t be the reason they’re all caught. He’s really going to do this; jump again, only this time – he’s jumping because he wants to live.

But then, that doesn’t really matter either.

Newt doesn’t know if they can make the landing, if it’s even possible. The truth is that this – jumping right now – is their only option and even if it kills them, it’s better than being caught in this room when the door breaks open.

At least this choice, not that it’s much of one, is theirs.

  


But then the door does burst behind them.

For a single moment, when he leaps clear of the ledge, the fall feels infinite, like he’ll never reach the end.

He’s been here before, felt this before, the rush of finally being free. For just a split second back then, nothing could reach him; not the Grievers, the hopelessness, the crippling sadness or the worries of the Glade. Then it had been consumed with stabbing horror, regret like a knife between his ribs even before the ivy had snatched him from the sky.

This time he doesn’t regret and nothing stops the fall.

Hitting the water feels like his bones breaking apart.

The shock, the impact, the pressure all close in on him. His head is too busy, too rushed, too pained to remember to be afraid of water. But if it hurts this much, if he feels cold, brittle like he was shattered into atoms as he broke the surface, then its good. He’s alive.

They climb out and Newt is forced to do a hasty re-evaluation on just how alive they are – or will be for much longer.

In the street are four masked WCKD soldiers, guns trained on them. Their options are fast running out.

Thomas will never give in. Not now, not so close or knowing how much they want him, what Minho is worth to them…or that Newt is worth nothing at all.

They are all about to die here.

And then one of them turns on the others, and with three precision shots, before anyone can react, they are on the ground. The one left standing rips off his mask and Newt sees Thomas sigh in relief even as Minho goes rigid. His own hands shake with a rush of adrenaline.

Gally came back for them.

Of course he did.

He skims his eyes up the side of the building they leapt free from but whatever he might want to say to them cuts down to a single statement – “You guys are nuts” – because they’re out of time.

They need to go. Right now.

.

The streets are a raging, fiery world, full of gunfire, screams and the concussive blast of explosions from shrapnel bombs. The taste of burning hangs thickly in the air, smoke cloying in every breath. Waves of heat crash outwards, sweeping the city as more is lost to the siege. Its there, crouched in the shadow of broken crates at the corner of a building overhang as the world glows orange that it happens again.

Newt coughs.

Heads snap over to him. Minho looks sympathetic – which makes sense. He never knew that Newt had been sick to start with so he has no reason to worry. But Gally’s eyes flash and Thomas-

Thomas looks terrified.

“It’s just a cough,” Newt says. “Smoke.”

Gally hesitates for a beat and then he turns back to checking behind them, apparently reassured.

But then Newt feels his hands shake again. He knows it’s not adrenaline. Its not smoke either.

It’s a familiar tremor, one that comes with icy horror, something he thought he’d gotten rid of, that he wouldn’t need to fear again. He thought he had time. He should have known better. It’s wearing off. Already it’s wearing off.

Newt locks it away. He handled this alone once already. He can do it again – he can, he can; despite the part of him frozen in the corner of his own mind screaming that he can’t go there again, can’t endure it again – he _can_. Even if experiencing real hope for a future, for just a few short hours has made it so much harder, he can still lock it away. He has to.

Hope is a great and terrible thing that was allowed to take root in his soul and he should never have let it. But his soul is already battered and bruised. He can make it handle this too. He has to. He has to.

This is his to carry.

_Lock it away._

_You have time._

It feels like trying to crush the lid closed on a suitcase that’s been overpacked.

He looks up.

Thomas is still watching him. He knows.

For all the ways Thomas is clueless, he’s also incredibly smart. Newt meets his gaze quietly. They can’t all be afraid and Minho has suffered enough without needing to worry that Newt is sick – relapsing, actually – as well.

But – wait.

That terror in Thomas’s face has gone. His expression is fixed and burning, the fiery implosion of the city reflected in usually honeyed eyes. He looks like he’s ready to tear apart the world.

Under the weight of that expression…Newt isn’t afraid.

He’s a little bit in love with him, but not afraid.

“We have to move,” Thomas says.

Gally swings back to them again. “They’re still firing rockets out there,” he protests, incredulous even though nothing about how Thomas said it implied it was up for negotiation. “And what did Brenda even say?”

“I don’t care,” Thomas says. There’s no heat to it at all. No anger, frustration or consideration. It’s a simple statement, perhaps a little chilling in the way he delivers it without bite but the way it feels like steel anyway. His expression is like a storm, barely holding back.

Gally folds the second he registers it.

It’s a curious thing; Gally is taller, has a greater bulk to his rangy frame, and Newt always knew him to be a formidable force. It’s fascinating to see him yield under this single cool remark.

It makes Newt’s blood run hot and he firmly blames that on the way the serum is fast wearing down. It’s viable; he’s been used to his blood running hot and cold in the past months, watching poison spread under his skin. If those times had anything to do with Thomas either…Well. It won’t hurt to lie to himself a bit longer, as always.

“Brenda’s meeting us in the square,” Thomas says, as soon as he takes in the way Gally’s shoulders soften in acceptance and it jolts Newt from his thoughts. “We are leaving. Now.”

Newt's heart twists and he sucks in a breath. He’s not used to being the first priority – he’s not sure how to handle that – but he can’t shake the sudden thought, a realisation, perhaps, that maybe he’s been that to Thomas longer than either of them have known.

Gally pulls a face.

Its one he's always been good at; one that's exasperated beyond all belief, thinks an idea is a thousand percent ridiculous and liable to get them all killed. But it also means he's going to go along with it anyway, if for no other reason than bailing all their arses out when things go wrong.

"Okay, fine," he says, and he's speaking directly to Thomas. "But if I get shot, I'll kill you."

Thomas just flashes him a look that says he doesn’t care about that either.

In the next instant, they’re moving again. Newt coughs into his hand and clenches it into a fist as another tremor ricochets up his arm, nerves flaring hot with fear.

_He has time. Lock it away._

.

The serum slips away with every frantic beat of his heart as they race through the city. They don’t stop. The end of the world is at their backs and they have to make it.

.

The berg rests on the cracked paving stones of the city square. The engines are still going, rotor blades stirring a violent down-draft that buffets Brenda and Vince as they wait by the lowered ramp in anxious expectation.

Newt feels shaky, a touch on edge, but mostly fine when they rush up into the hulking shadow of the plane.

He’s okay. He will be. They have more serum here. Admitting he needs to use it digs at him, like a knife under his ribs, scraping the bone – that hasn’t changed; people still suffered for that, for him to live – but Newt knows that as much as he doesn’t want to be selfish, he doesn’t want to die either.

He stopped wanting to die a long time ago.

They just have to work out how Brenda’s lasted this long and why his didn’t. There are too many external factors to be sure and he can’t survive on his friends’ pain forever. He won’t.

“Okay, okay,” Brenda says, her voice catching in the swirling air. She sounds relieved. “Let’s go. Everyone get in.”

Gally and Minho rush past, up the ramp. There’s a quiet glance – nothing more than a fleeting acknowledgement – between Brenda and Gally and in any other world, Newt might file that away. But he doesn’t. Not this time.

Thomas stalls, hesitates, and that blots out everything else.

Newt hates that he saw it coming.

“Thomas?” Brenda’s voice tremors even more but she’s not surprised. There’s a firm note in the question. Perhaps she saw this coming, too.

“Why is it wearing off?” Thomas asks.

He isn’t talking to them. It’s an expression Newt knows well; the way his eyes narrow, the whiskey colour turning dark as they get intense and distant all at once. It’s the way all his attention curls inwards, like he’s rushing through the information in his own brain and everything else just…leaves.

“You’re still fine,” he mutters, half a flick of attention in Brenda’s direction before his head shakes and he rubs at his forehead, zoning back to Newt. “But you…”

Brenda goes still.

Newt watches fear ravage her expression, sweeping across her features with keen brutality. Its not fear for herself. Newt catches her eyes. He figures he probably looks the same. The terror is like a searing hot drug, flooding his bloodstream.

Thomas is going to leave.

He’s going to leave and Newt isn’t going to be able to stop him. He can see it happening in his head; can see the way the future shifts. It goes from a fiery wash of colour in a burning city to dead greys, ash falling like snow as Thomas turns and runs back towards the people who want to destroy him.

Fault lines spike through the image as it disintegrates in his mind, breaking into flakes, going dark at the edges. Newt pulls himself back. He’s never even seen snow; only knows that everything goes cold when Thomas leaves. The world feels empty; just the two of them in it. He can feel the crackle and spark of a familiar, unwelcome entity in the back of his head, in the stressed ends of his nerves.

“Thomas,” he says firmly. “Whatever it is, we’ll work it out, alright? We will. We’re not giving up. But we have to leave. Right now.”

Thomas wavers, indecisive, eyes glancing back to the fast crumbling skyline behind them. It’s a riot of colour and carnage, fire and brimstone, an empire burning down.

“Tommy, _please_.”

This nickname means something to Thomas, even if neither of them is entirely sure exactly what. But it doesn’t matter. Newt’s prepared to use pretty much anything he has if it will stop Thomas leaving.

Thomas lets out a long breath in a low shudder. Newt watches it ripple through the plane of his chest at his open collar even though its silent, drowned out by the roar of the rotors. He’s caving. He’s going to stay.

Relief feels like free-fall. Newt’s heart swoops down, and the crackling edge of madness in his head quiets, just for a moment.

He should have known better than to trust it.

That’s right when there’s a piercing shriek of sound that makes it through even the engine noise like a blood-curdling whistle blow. On its tail, Teresa’s voice fills the city, pouring down the streets, washing through the explosions and flooding straight for them. It blankets everything; a haunting, telepathic echo.

It feels like being abruptly submerged underwater.

Newt is only half listening.

_You can save Newt . … . .. Still time. . … .. .finally be over.. . … . .. Come back._

Fear and fury crash together in his chest, setting his nerves on fire and the down-draft feels both hot and cold as it prickles on his exposed skin like claws. His eyes fix on Thomas’ face. He can feel the effects of the serum metabolising in his bloodstream with the way his anger twists, vicious and alive. His vision glows.

Thomas is the cure.

And Newt hates Teresa more than he’s hated anything.

No. He doesn’t.

(It’s not his, it isn’t. This enmity; that’s the virus talking. She gave him this much time, if nothing more. Without it, he might already be-

But that’s a thought he doesn’t want to follow.)

He doesn’t hate her. He’s losing himself faster than he did the first time but he can deal with that. He’d rather deal with that than this – because she wants Thomas to go back.

The cure has never felt so much like a cruel joke.

The world has never been this ruthless, not even when it forced him to survive his only attempt to escape it, three years ago in a maze corridor with a tangle of ivy that left him crippled. Instead it poisoned him. And now its taking this, too; taking _Thomas_ , too.

Thomas’ face is set and full of apology. He’s already decided.

Newt feels some deep, buried part of himself, somewhere near the core of who he is, shatter apart.

“Tommy-“ he tries, a broken note of warning. “Don’t do it.”

“Newt-” Thomas’ voice cracks in half. His eyes are glossy as he swallows, tongue flashing across the seam of his mouth with all the things he seems to be biting back from saying. He deflates as he releases a helpless breath.

“It’s wearing off,” he repeats and this time he’s right here, talking right to Newt, terrified. “You heard her, okay? I’m…if its _true_ … then this is what WCKD have been trying to find.”

A sudden burst of white hot rage ricochets down Newt’s spine. It swells in the middle of his brain and explodes out down his nerves; vivid shocks, electric and savage.

Thomas. They’ve been trying to find Thomas.

And Newt doesn’t _care_.

“Don’t do it,” he repeats, aware that his voice has gone brittle with how he tries so hard not to scream it. “The world is already gone, Thomas. You really think-“

“What?” Thomas cuts, confused and incredulous. For a flash of a second he looks bewildered - and then something sharp settles into place behind his eyes. “I don’t care about the _world_ , Newt.”

Newt’s throat closes up and Thomas flinches forwards. For a second, its like he wants to put himself between Newt and the virus eroding his thoughts. Newt was meant to be the insane one.

Faster. Too fast. It’s wearing off too fast.

“I have never done anything for the world,” Thomas says. The buffeted wind over their heads and the echo of explosions behind them rip at the words and it feels like they’re talking into a hurricane, but Newt hears him. His voice isn’t raised, its an earnest plea but its louder than everything that’s been screaming inside Newt’s head for months. “They put me in the Maze because I betrayed them. I did everything I did to get us out of there, to get us away from WCKD, to get us to the Right Arm, to get Minho back.

“It’s wearing off. And if I really am-…”

Thomas’ thought fails him, throat closing off, but then he swallows and looks up, his expression resolute, blindingly honest.

“It’s not the _world_ I want to save, Newt.”

Surprise batters through Newt’s brain. This is something he never really expected Thomas to tell him. He thought he’d never live to hear it, or that it simply didn’t exist, not in this way. But now that its there, it’s dangerous; it’s something he can lose.

 _Him_.

Wild, sharp affection collides in his bloodstream with frenzied panic and more anger (always more) that isn’t his. He feels his own voice lash out, the harsh sound of it trapped in the blast of air from above them.

“And I do not want you to throw away your life for me.”

Thomas stalls. He sucks in a sharp breath, and there’s a flash of something in his expression – something Newt doesn’t know how to place – and then he takes another step closer, this one quiet, purposeful.

Newt is suddenly acutely aware that both Vince and Brenda have gone.

It’s just the two of them, has been for a while, standing underneath the rotor blades where they can’t be overheard as the city falls apart so far away.

“I need to know,” Thomas says. His voice shakes and his eyes are glassy. “I need to know if it’s true.”

Newt is beating back the hot pulse of malice in his head that just tells him to scream. He’s slipping, but he already did this once; lashed out even though he understood. He told himself that same moment, the one when he came back to find his own body had betrayed him, that he was never going to let it happen again – not to Thomas.

But now the Flare is drumming in his head like a war-beat.

Newt has never considered himself worth much, but he would be stupid if he wasn’t aware of what he means to Thomas. He’s seen it, lived it. He knows because he knows what his choice would be if things were reversed.

If it were him who’s blood shone blue and Thomas – _Tommy_ – was the one standing here with a parasite crawling into his brain he wouldn’t have thought twice. It’s not fair to ask Thomas to not go. He knows that. He does.

He hates it too.

Thomas sighs. His gaze darts across the ground, travelling back to follow the path they came from. Then he finds Newt’s eyes again and speaks quietly, only just audible in the whirling air.

“If you’d never taken that serum back there – from Teresa…I don’t even know if you’d still be here right now. I can’t just-“

The words catch and die.

“I’ll be careful,” he re-decides. Newt’s mind trips out; fear and anger and insanity blending together, spiralling down.

He’s pretty sure Thomas doesn’t know how to be careful. He’s never seen much supporting eviden- No. Wait. That’s mean. Thomas is smarter than he seems – smarter than a lot of people give him credit for.

But.

Janson isn’t stupid, and he’s looking for them. Janson and Ava and a hundred WCKD soldiers in a city that’s on high alert for any glimpse of Thomas even as rebels storm the streets and wage war. Careful - even Thomas’ brand of careful, which seems to be reckless luck rather than anything else – will only go so far. Going back is dangerous. Going back means Newt could _lose_ him-

“-wt? Hey- Newt?”

There are hands either side of his neck, thumbs brushing the line of his jaw, fingers lacing over the nodules of vertebrae that start at the back of his skull and trace down into his shirt collar. His skin turns hot, gravity sliding in his blood and reality fires through the damaged neurons in his brain.

He snaps out of it.

Thomas is pulled in close, fear etched into his expression. Not of Newt; never of him. It’s fear of what’s happening to him, the powerlessness of stopping it.

“I’m fine,” Newt says. His tongue feels heavy, his throat just a little bit raw – only a little. Nothing to worry about.

Thomas doesn’t even have the grace to look mildly reassured.

“I’m coming back,” he swears instead.

Newt swallows hard. “I’m coming with you.”

It’s not smart. Even a little. He knows it isn’t, knows Thomas won’t agree, but he says it anyway. He doesn’t really want Thomas out of his sight. Too much feels like it could happen.

Thomas releases him.

(Maybe the world has been trying to take Thomas away since before they ever even met).

Newt’s fever hot skin burns cold in the sudden rush of air that takes the place of Thomas’ hands. His head is full of betrayal and thoughts that he doesn’t own – _aren’t mine_ – and he doesn’t want Thomas tangled up there. Not like that. Not when he’s not alone in his own mind all over again.

“No,” Thomas tells him. Newt knew it was coming. The part of him that’s still him – sane, logical – agrees. “Stay here; take another dose of the serum.”

The idea of it makes him sick. “Thomas-“

“I’m coming back, Newt,” Thomas repeats, his voice sliding into something soft and urgent.

But a beat passes and Thomas hasn’t moved.

It takes a moment to dawn on Newt – the weight of the choice he now has to make.

Newt has been alive longer with Minho, Frypan and Gally than he ever has with this crazy, reckless, stupidly brave Greenie. The isolated, contained Glade, run on the decisions of a teenaged council were all he had ever known, but since they stepped into the Scorch everything changed. Here there are adults, children holding guns, entire populations that seek to take advantage of others, to sell them out if it saves their own skins. There are good people too; thriving in the ruins but this ecosystem is nothing like the one they abandoned.

The years in the Glade feel ethereal; distant compared to the lifetime he’s spent at Thomas’ shoulder in this world.

They’ve been looking to each other for over a year, but right now, Thomas is going to do this alone. He may not want to, but he will.

Newt can’t bring himself to support it, can’t get over the parasitic feeling that Thomas won’t come back. And if he doesn’t…

If he doesn’t…

_It’s not the world I want to save._

Newt will have lost something far more valuable than a cure.

  


Newt weighed precisely the worth of his own life a long time ago. He’s never questioned that if it came to it, he would rather die than see WCKD take Thomas back. (Its not about immunity or being broken or even that he once wanted to die. Its just that he wants Thomas to live. Somewhere along the way, that became more important).

The problem is… he knows exactly what his life is worth to Thomas.

(More. Enough).

There is no illusion here, between them. Newt thinks maybe there never has been. He’s always known who Thomas is.

He was stupid to hope this would never place them on opposite sides.

Teresa handed them a way to save him and Thomas is going to take it.

  


And this is where he has to choose.

What if it were him? He knows that turning around, going back to WCKD and leaving Thomas behind if he hated it (hated _him_ for doing it)…it would tear him in half. It would damage something, maybe beyond fixing.

So he gives Thomas the only thing he can.

He forces himself to nod, a tight movement, teeth gritted and eyes tight shut. He isn’t agreeing, but he is letting him go. As if he ever had the power to stop him anyway.

He feels Thomas exhale, so close, the relief in it almost tangible even as the rush of breath is swept away by the air current. But then-

There’s a hand on the back of his neck.

A reassuring voice, low in his ear.

“Just hold on.”

(Words that are familiar to his fogged mind, that sound like Minho’s, and Newt wonders if it was on purpose).

And then Thomas is gone.

But it’s okay. It’s okay. It is.

Because Newt doesn’t know how to do anything but hold onto him. It feels like all he’s been holding onto for a year now is the mission to get Minho back, and Thomas himself. He’s got one; Newt never agreed to lose the other in its place.

So fine. If the world wants to do this to him, he has his own card to play.

He’s not taking any more serum until Thomas is back.

.

Brenda tries to make him get inside first.

He refuses.

Gally and Frypan both try next. He refuses that too. Minho nearly works. Someone, at some point, told Minho he was sick. Or he just worked it out. His oldest friend’s wounded, scared face as he tries to hand over a dose of the enzyme almost does it.

But he can’t.

Absently Newt thinks it must be showing by now. The serum’s worn off enough that he can feel his mind slipping all over again, spiralling in circles, the errant thoughts that aren’t his coming faster.

He’s terrified of losing himself.

But he thinks he’s more afraid of being himself again if Thomas never makes it back.

“I’m sorry,” he says dully, feeling that familiar darkness throb in his veins, the roughness itch at the back of his throat. There’s pain in his chest again now. It’s manageable; he’s lived through worse. It doesn’t hurt like it did the time he shattered his leg. But it’s there. It’s a way to measure time; he’s getting worse. “I just…he has to come back first.”

Minho’s expression shifts, turns solemn. His face is carved with sympathy – is it pity perhaps? – but there’s also a spark in his eyes, a flash, a realisation.

“Something happened in the last…however long it’s been, didn’t it?”

The year he spent with Thomas stretches out in his memory, a sunburst over an endless salt plane with a horizon that rippled up into a blazing sky. It’s full of surviving, leaning, struggling onward, always onward, of reassurances and never giving up. It’s full of the stupid moments that were chased by guilt, the tense ones chased by exhaustion. It’s full of falling asleep on the move, of adjusting to the weight of a gun in his hand, of waking up every day to a world that’s forsaken them.

It’s a year full of learning to spearhead a revolution.

That year spans so much of his life, but it’s still full of everything he never said to Thomas; all the things that couldn’t happen. And now, he thinks that maybe he’s glad for it, in a way.

He’s sick. He’s been living on borrowed time for too long, and he never wanted that ticking clock to hurt anyone more than he could help. Maybe Thomas will find a cure, but maybe he won’t. Maybe Thomas won’t come back. Maybe Newt won’t take any more serum. Maybe. Maybe. And he thinks that maybe it would have been far worse now if they’d ever had time before.

It’s a question that survived the apocalypse, still without an answer. What is better, in the end? To have loved something and lost it, or never to have loved it at all?

But.

Then again.

He thinks, maybe, he’s too late anyway, to have never loved Thomas at all.

There’s a hand on his arm.

Newt flinches under it; feels the world come back to meet him, the way his heart turns over in his chest.

No.

He mustn’t think that. That’s too close, too much. He retracts that last thought. He never had it. It didn’t happen.

 _Shhhhhh_ , he tells his mind; the malicious, dark creature that’s coiled there, smug and waiting. _I didn’t think it. If I didn’t think it, I can’t lose it_.

He doesn’t listen to what the creature says back.

He turns to Minho and tries to offer a wan smile of reassurance to him.

“Nothing happened,” he says aloud.

Minho scoffs.

He _scoffs._

And the sound is so unexpected that it momentarily jars loose the entity in Newt’s brain. His eyes snap up.

Minho still bears the marks of his imprisonment. His eyes are weary, clouded with remembered pain and horrors and the vestiges of drugs. There’s a sheen of sweat on his skin; his breaths have settled now, but he’s not as fit as he once was and there’s a tremor in his hands as he holds onto the rejected capsule of serum. But he’s here. He’s battered and bruised and exhausted and scared, but he’s here and he’s still Minho.

He is also shaking his head.

“Maybe nothing you acted on, Shank,” is what he says.

Newt’s heart twists, jack-knifing in his chest so much so it comes with a burst of pain as the pulsing poison ripples out.

_No. No. Bury it. He didn’t think it. If he never had it he can’t lose it._

He knows that’s a lie.

Lying feels safer.

“Nothing happened,” Newt repeats, voice scraping. “Nothing was going to.”

Minho sighs. It’s an odd sound; like he’s truly sad but also deeply amused.

“Because neither of you wanted it to mean Goodbye.”

Newt rather honestly doubts Thomas has stopped to consider anything quite that symbolic in the entire year he’s been alive. But he holds his tongue. He’s given up a lot already. Some of it he gave up without realising, some of it he did knowingly, purposely. But this he’ll keep. It won’t harm anyone but him.

Besides. There’s still a chance it’s true. He’ll just never know. Its better that way.

  


Minho doesn’t try to make him take the serum again.

.

Thomas isn’t coming back.

It takes a while – too long, perhaps – for that realisation to hit. But when it does, it’s almost…weightless. Inconsequential. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything.

“Newt?” Vince asks, head snapping up the second Newt strides up the ramp and into the cool interior of the berg.

He can taste copper in his mouth, the sickly flavour of decay when he swallows. There are tremors in his bones, a thick pulse in the middle of his thoughts that is the corrosive spread of infection. His vision tints red and the air stings in his lungs. It’s getting worse. Again. Of course it is. He doesn’t care.

“Thomas?” Brenda asks.

She stands up from her seat as the name spills from her mouth.

She looks simultaneously hopeful and painfully detached. She knows he’s not bringing good news – that he hasn’t seen Thomas running back towards them. He wouldn’t have entered ahead if he’d spotted him coming.

Newt shakes his head anyway.

She blinks, eyes casting down as she chews at her lip and bites back what is clearly a sob.

Well that’s stupid.

What does she think he’s doing? Giving up?

Newt doesn’t stop to correct her. They don’t have time to spare; they’ve wasted enough of it. He turns sharply to the others instead, frenzied determination prickling under his skin, making him shake as he takes in Vince’s evaluating expression.

“We’re going after him,” Newt tells them. His voice tears at his throat as he forces the words out, but the pain of renewed bleeding in his lungs feels just as distant as everything else. Everyone flinches at the grating sound of it but he doesn’t spare a thought for that either. “Get this thing in the air.”

.

They’re in the air. No one talks about the falling buildings, the sea of fire spreading out beneath them, blanketing streets littered with rubble, cars and broken bodies. No one mentions how slim the chances are that they’ll even be able to see Thomas, let alone reach him. No one mentions how unlikely it is that Thomas is even still alive.

They just coast over Denver, hellfire reflected in the glass of the cockpit and smoke blotting out the stars.

.

“Newt we have to give you another dose,” Vince tries.

Newt shakes his head. “Not until we have him back.”

Vince sighs. He hesitates, glancing up to the cockpit where Jorge sits in the pilot’s seat, arms spread over the control deck. But then he’s turning back to face Newt. His expression is pensive, conflicted; like he’s playing through scenarios, trying to decide which action to take.

Newt waits, wonders which will win out.

He finally settles on a face that seems to say he already knows this effort will be fruitless, but he’s moving to try it anyway.

“Newt, what’s the plan here, man?”

Its something Vince has asked Thomas numerous times in the past year.

Now it rings hollow.

Thomas’ absence beside him is a gaping wound and he’s bleeding out. He feels it the way a war veteran feels a missing limb; phantom aches and shooting pains and constantly moving to use it even though they can see its gone. (Always glancing at the space beside his shoulder even though its empty).

But no. That’s wrong.

They’re getting Thomas back. Newt won’t leave without him – Jorge wouldn’t take him away, would he? And besides – Thomas promised.

He…did promise, didn’t he?

Oh God. Had he promised?

Newt doesn’t remember. Panic rushes for him. Thomas wouldn’t break a promise he made him; he wouldn’t. Ever since the one he made to Chuck shattered as he died Thomas has treated promises like they’re made of spun glass. But if he didn’t make one…If there was no promise-

“Newt!”

Newt feels his mind snap like elastic, back into his body, a burst of white-hot pain lashing out in its wake. His fingers are speared through his hair, nails digging into his scalp and he can feel his own sharp breaths in his ears over the stinging in his head.

Is that his fingernails or his brain?

How will he fall apart first?

But he fixes on Vince – the commanding tone, threaded with alarm. It brings him back.

“I’m okay,” Newt says. He carefully lets go of his head.

“You’re not okay, kid,” Vince replies, sympathetic but iron-firm, unapologetic with the truth. “Haven’t been for a while, I’d guess. You need to take the serum, Newt.”

“Not-“

“Until he’s back?” Vince presses, and the challenge in it sounds like something else; like he’s challenging that _Thomas is even returning_

The world tints red.

But before Newt can open his mouth again, Vince is continuing.

“And what if we can’t find him, huh? What if he doesn’t come to us, what if he can’t? What then? We’ll have to land this thing eventually; there are kids here that aren’t safe yet. And you; you’re just going to get worse? Are you really going to make them watch you disappear?

“Are you going to make Minho watch that?”

The red haze fades.

The inside of the berg is still and cold, the ground swaying slowly and the hum of the engines resonate inside the metal drum of the transport’s belly.

Newt can’t answer him. He knows its all true, and cruel and unfair. He _knows_. He’s insane, not stupid. (And this is the second time in a matter of hours that someone has thrown his same biting logic at him; forcing friends to watch him go mad) But he can’t-

“Leave it.”

Newt and Vince both snap their attention across to Minho, sitting braced against the side wall of the berg, body folded in and expression grave. There’s sombre understanding gouged into the strained lines of his face and his voice is torn. He nods, once, a soft dip of his head at odds with the sharp swallow that bobs his throat.

Vince visibly bites down on whatever else he had to say and walks away.

Newt exhales, feels the viscous, clotting infection snarl in his lungs. It hurts, it hurts, but some tiny part of him is peaceful, just for an instant because Minho gets it. Minho is hurting too – of course he is. This isn’t right, isn’t fair, and Newt hates himself for putting his oldest friend through it. Minho should never have had to survive what he did only to watch Newt fade away instead...but it doesn’t change that he _gets_ it.

(As someone who barely ate or slept or moved for days until he knew that Newt would survive his suicide attempt, Minho maybe gets this better than most).

The berg’s engines hum and the sound fills the space, echoing off the metal.

They circle the city again.

…

At first Newt thinks Thomas is just exhausted. He doesn’t stop to consider that Thomas isn’t someone who just…gives up, even if the odds seem impossible. He’s seen Thomas push on through a lot, take punishment that should have broken a man stronger than him into fragments too small to piece back together, but it just doesn’t occur to Newt that this is more than tiredness clawing bone-deep.

Not until the second Teresa spots them, and Newt realises like flash-fire, its not exhaustion.

Thomas is wounded. He’s seriously wounded.

Teresa tugs them both up as the berg’s rotors lash at fire and smoke, forcing it back and clearing a path. She supports most of Thomas’ weight as they stumble across the stretch of roof. He’s covered in blood and grime, his clothes torn, skin pale and ashen.

He sways at the edge of a collapsing empire, bleary with blood-loss and agony, just beyond their reach.

The world is burning down and Teresa’s expression twists, hardens with resolve. In a last, desperate attempt, she hoists Thomas up, throwing him towards the berg and Vince’s outstretched hands.

For a second, heart-stopping and endless, Newt thinks Thomas isn’t going to make it. His blood runs ice cold and every atom inside his body folds inward, falls away from the crumbling remains of the world. He stopped wanting to die, he did, but he doesn’t know who he is without Thomas anymore. And even if he could face finding out, he’s not sure he could hold onto the last threads of his mind if he had to watch him actually plummet through the sky.

But Thomas hits the ramp and five pairs of hands haul him in.

Newt breathes.

(Poison. He’s still breathing poison, but he’s breathing).

  


Newt doesn’t even have to fight past the others. They part for him until he’s slamming to his knees on the metal grate and he can see for himself how much blood Thomas is losing. Lots. Too much, maybe. It seeps along cracks and through the grills, thick and inky in the burning dark. Thomas turns raggedly to reach for Teresa anyway.

She doesn’t make it.

She watches the building beside them give out and looks almost peaceful – like the concept of trying to jump to them never occurred to her at all – as the roof folds in and everything that WCKD was turns to scalding ash. She looks like a broken bird as she drops through the sky, swallowed by billowing smoke, embers reaching out to fall like meteors in her wake.

(Newt doesn’t know how to feel about it. She is tied up in so many memories of broken trust and betrayal and yet she brought Thomas back, got him out. Maybe he can forgive her memory for that alone. One day).

The pain in Thomas’ shout rips through Newt’s own chest and his hands shake for too many reasons as he reaches to pull Thomas back.

He’s been shot.

Newt isn’t sure what he was expecting but he’s both horrified and entirely unsurprised that this is it. This doesn’t happen, not for real. It shouldn’t.

(but it has).

  


  


.

Someone is gripping Newt’s shoulder.

Minho. His fingers dig into knotted muscle and tendon but Newt can barely feel it, and that’s when he registers that he can’t feel any pain in his legs either. He slammed into the grill hard, straight to his knees, but there was no dull pulse from the impact, no stab of agony from the damaged joint, no warning sting at all.

Pain has been a part of him for so long and now, without that, it feels like his identity is pooling away with Thomas’ blood, leaving more space for the madness.

He remembers more than ever everything he said to Minho before the berg took off, and the words are drowning him. If they run out of time now, with WCKD finally behind them, the world may be crueller than even Newt gave it credit for.

There’s a flurry of movement over his head that comes with a strange disconnect. The rear ramp is closed, the engines louder than ever, the berg rocking. They’re no longer patrolling the air; they’re speeding away. Brenda is digging inside a first aid kit and Vince cradles Thomas’ head while hands pass bandages and gauze over them. The grill has run red and Thomas feels far away, his body still and slack.

(Blood. So much blood. Newt wonders, for a split second, if he could hold it inside Thomas with his bare hands, if he could press a finger into the wound and force it back in. And then the realisation of that thought, of what it would truly be (what it would _look like_ ) makes Newt flinch violently, repulsion bursting in a shockwave through his brain. It’s so sharp that for a second, he feels like he’ll wretch up the empty contents of his stomach and his vision swims).

  


That’s when Thomas startles, body locking solid on the grate. There’s a wretched noise breaking at the back of his throat as he flails out with an arm, catching Brenda’s wrist and making her freeze. She nearly drops a roll of tape into Newt’s lap.

“Newt,” Thomas says, hazy and raw, urgency dragging up his throat. “The cure.”

Newt really does consider punching him for a split second.

But Brenda, for reasons unknown, appears to agree with this skewed priority.

“I know,” she says, leaning forward to press her palm gently, trembling to Thomas’ cheek. He quiets; whether its the touch or the acknowledgement isn’t clear.

Brenda twists her wrist from his hold as it loosens, taking his hand and setting it on Newt’s arm. Newt covers it reflexively. Even confused and half insane, he can’t help that.

“He’s right here, Thomas,” Brenda says. “Tell him yourself. Stay with us okay?”

Thomas hums but it sounds like he’s choking. His fingers spasm under Newt’s.

Newt looks up at Brenda, meeting the warning in her gaze even as her mouth twists with impossible saddness. And he gets it even if he’s not sure how. He’s lived with her for months now, been at her side through so much, but he cant help thinking that understanding this wordless look is more about desperation and unique empathy than it is about being able to read Brenda herself.

Thomas is fading away and they need to keep him talking, keep him fighting for his own life and they both know that this cure is what he nearly gave it up for.

“Tommy,” Newt says to him, leaning close. Talking hurts, he can feel his windpipe closing in, creaking in his throat like it’ll shatter. But Thomas’ breath rushes out and his head turns, eyes still closed, to pick out Newt’s voice in the chaos.

Its strange. Heightened moments are meant to make the Flare move faster but instead it’s silent. Newt’s head echoes with the sheer empty space inside of it.

“Tommy, hey, listen to me, okay? I’m going to be fine.”

The lie feels stale but he says it anyway. He’ll take the serum; he will, Thomas risked too much for him not to, but he can’t until they’ve stopped him bleeding out. Thomas can’t die here, not because of him. The rest doesn’t matter.

Thomas is silent and Newt’s heart hammers. His vision is going dark at the corners. And then-

“I’m sorry,” Thomas breathes.

(a sharp, lancing spike of fear that’s like a spear being forced between his ribs, twisted up and tearing apart organs-)

“You don’t get to be sorry.” Newt tries to say it soft but the fear is dripping through his bloodstream and it comes out crackling, snapping between his teeth. “You’re not going to do anything you have to apologise to me for.”

“Almost….almost didn’t- come back,” Thomas manages.

There’s cold sweat on his skin, smearing the dust and blood. Newt can see his heartbeat in the taut cord of his neck; the pulse frantic and hopeless. He swallows thickly, his eyes blinking faster, pupils unfocused, distant as his irises dilate and contract.

He didn’t promise.

Thomas never promised him that he’d make it. He said he’d come back, he never said he’d survive longer than that. Newt remembers that bit now.

(Terror so strong its a creature all of its own, entirely separate from either himself or the Flare, unfurls in his stomach. His molecules are folding inward, every breath he snatches feeding the darkness).

Thomas didn’t promise him he’d stay.

Reality is slipping away, spilling through his fingers like the blood on the floor that’s already coagulating, drying and flaking at the edges where it’s reached his knees. The world is black at the edges, the rest turning to shades of red, starting with the hole in Thomas’ stomach.

Newt isn’t angry anymore. The terror has come to life so fast its like its wearing Newt’s skin and just….taken over, so extreme that he doesn’t even feel it at all. Not rage or pain or fear, not the brittle pulls of air in his lungs or the cutting fire of synapses in his brain. He feels numb. Its all just...gone.

  


He slams back into his body like being hit with a truck when Thomas’ fingers clamp on his wrist. Its so tight its like a vice. (He’ll bruise from it. He’s glad). The effort is probably killing Thomas faster. Tremulously, wincing and snatching breaths at the pain it must cost him, Thomas holds his other hand across his body and opens his fingers.

The tiny capsule of serum is the only thing that isn’t cast in shades of red and black. It shines against Thomas’ bloodied, chalky skin; electric blue, glowing from the inside, almost. Unearthly. Future in a bottle.

“Take it,” Thomas says. Newt is ready to refuse; the no is already heavy on his tongue but Thomas makes a strangled sound, hands going slack and Newt reaches to close his fingers on the glass vial before it can fall. When he glances up again, Thomas is crying; the tears clearing tracks in his skin, slipping back into his hair. “Take it,” Thomas repeats, now little more than a whisper, eyes unfocused again, falling closed. “Take it and I’ll….be okay.”

Newt doesn’t know how he means it.

He’ll be okay just knowing Newt is going to be cured? Or he’ll actually fight to stay? Newt isn’t sure he wants to know. Either way its not something he’s willing to risk.

Just like in the WCKD lab, what seems like so long ago, he’s going to pass off this choice now because if he’s not the one who makes it, maybe he can find a way to live with it.

Its the terror and the madness combined that take the serum from Thomas’ loose fingers and hold it back towards Gally.

“Don’t you dare leave us, Tommy,” Newt says, even though Thomas is barely breathing, body lax again.

And all Newt can think as he feels – barely, like its happening to someone else – the needle sink into his arm, is that here he is; he’s been handed a miracle. He’s going to live and right in front of him, Thomas is dying. He’s _dying_.

  


  


  


.

Newt doesn’t know that Thomas is really going to make it until a week later.

Its in the middle of a summer storm that’s churned up along the coast, pulling at the beach, throwing it into the turbulent surf as if they weren’t already close enough to the end of the world. This is where they built their Haven. Thomas’ fever breaks as thunder rolls over the ocean and they pull him from the induced coma. He doesn’t wake up, but he’s breathing even with the drugs (few, only what they could find) draining out of his system.

Sonya is still shaken, affected by the things she suffered at WCKD’s hands but she’s the only one of them with any kind of medical experience who stepped forward to help. She tells them Thomas is just sleeping now; that all they can do is wait.

She lets Newt stay.

Newt stays for weeks.

He knows when he watches the colour spill back into Thomas’ skin that he’s going to make it. He knows when Thomas starts to shift under the blankets, brow furrowing, heart beating fitfully that he’s going to make it. If he can dream, if he can have nightmares, he’s alive. He knows it when he hears Thomas breathe out Chuck’s name in his sleep like its a goodbye and not a hello. He knows.

But Newt doesn’t really let himself believe it until the morning Thomas finally leaves the hut at the end of the beach.

He ducks out of the stooped doorway, barely a shadow against the washed blues of the horizon, and makes his way towards the village tucked into the coast. He’s sleepy and a little uncoordinated at first, moving carefully, mindful of an injury that’s done most of its healing without him, but he seems to take root in his own body more with every step he takes, every face he recognises.

Brenda spots him first, then Aris, and then Minho and Gally. Newt’s eyes land on Thomas and he feels clean, healthy air trap inside his lungs; painless and bright, tasting like sea salt and open sky.

Thomas crashes into Minho first. He holds tight and Minho clutches him back, the both of them folded together for long moments, barely moving, heads tilted close under the sharp sun. Newt is reminded again (watching Minho’s forlorn glances to Thomas’ hut over the past month reminds him daily), that Thomas barely even got his best friend back before he was the one who almost left.

Newt isn’t the only one who has time now. They all do.

Slowly, Thomas draws back, a watery smile on his face as he claps Minho’s shoulder. Then his gaze is sliding past, searching through the gather of people who’ve approached in a haze of awe and alarm; like they’re looking at a ghost. He doesn’t pause on any of them, not until he finds Newt there, and then Newt can feel the ocean inside his chest but he’s not drowning. He’s not even a little bit afraid of drowning.

It feels like the first day in the Glade; a beginning of sorts, but this one comes without walls or Grievers. It comes with a horizon, with freedom and with Thomas, vividly alive, eyes turning gold in the sun, and Newt gets to be here to see it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So.
> 
> This has been through a lot of edits over the months. Whole chunks of it were dropped out or reworked because it just felt too heavy. Ultimately, I think parts of it still do and my favourite so far is still Trade. But on that:
> 
> I set out trying to tackle a narration wherein you could feel Newt losing his mind as you read, but its not just that straightforward. Over the course of the story he recovers, and then backslides again, loses time and goes through moments when he's entirely aware he's losing his mind. In moments he's fighting it tooth and nail and in other seconds he's embracing the kind of peverse freedom it gives him. So the narration was always going to be an utter mess. I just really wanted to try writing in that kind of crazed headspace which is really why this has taken so so long.
> 
> As always, what kind of success I had with it is entirely in your hands as a reader. But however or whatever you want to take away from this is entirely yours and I'd love to know how you read it and what you thought.
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!


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